Blizzard Watch needs your support in our Patreon pledge drive! Here’s the latest on the state of the site.

Hello readers, listeners, and fans! Blizzard Watch exists thanks to your support on Patreon, and we still need your support to thrive. For the remainder of the month, we’re running a Patreon pledge drive to keep our numbers steady, and I wanted to give you all an update on the state of the site, after our troubles last year.

Let’s start with an update the state of Patreon right now, since we started our pledge drive last week:

Our goal is to keep Patreon between $4,500 and $5,000 per month, which lets us pay for writing, editing, and podcasting, as well as all of the expenses involved in keeping a website online.

Currently, our Patreon is at $4,448 $4,407, just slightly under our minimum and a little lower than it was when I first posted this last week. This isn’t entirely unusual, as throughout the month people change or drop their pledges. I completely understand that not everyone can afford to support us financially, or maintain that support indefinitely. That’s exactly why we’re having this pledge drive, to maintain the support necessary to keep the site running smoothly.

I’d like to get us closer to $5,000, which will let us keep a steady stream of new content and grow a little.

And now let’s talk about the overall state of the site, how we got here, and where we’re going:

Since last summer, we’ve struggled with low advertising revenue, and we’ve been leaning on Patreon for most of our income. Your support has allowed us to bring our post count back up, and we’ve just hired several new writers to increase post count further. You may have noticed that some days the site is extremely light on news, but we’re working to get back to publishing five to seven articles a day, with a mix of short news posts, regular features, and longer guides. This puts us about where we were before the crisis.

But we’re not wholly relying on your generosity to keep the site going: we’ve been working to find a new ad partner to support the site. We recently added ads to podcasts, which will make them self-sustaining and could let us do more podcasts. We switched to a new ad provider on the site late last year, and after not having much success we switched to another new ad provider this month. If you’ve been reading the site, you probably know the ad rollout was a little wonky, and things on the site may still look a little odd as we test different ads and placements. If you see any broken ads, offensive ads, ads with sound, or ads that are just obnoxious, please contact us at [email protected]. Ads are an important way to support the site, but we don’t want them to be a bad user experience, so let us know if you see any problems.

Things are looking good, and I’d like to keep it that way. That’s why I’m reminding you that we need your support to keep the site running. If you can support us on Patreon — even with a small pledge — it really helps the site.

Please support us on Patreon by subscribing or increasing your Patreon tier. Donate by May 31 so we can keep creating the quality content you enjoy.

Every dollar helps, and we have some neat benefits for our supporters:

• For $3/month: Early access to all of our podcasts, ad-free.
• For $5/month: In addition to podcast benefits, you can also read the site completely ad-free.
• For $10/month: In addition to previous benefits, you also get access to view a staff-only chat channel on Discord for a behind-the-scenes look at how we make content, as well as a supporter-only Discord channel to chat with our writers.

If you can’t support us financially, we understand. Please share this post, like or review our podcasts, or share any content with friends who might enjoy it. We also appreciate moral support — every little bit helps!

Thanks everyone — I’m so glad you’re here with us.